It’s amazing to think that this time next year will have been 10 years since my BA course graduation It has been a long and winding journey with many a twist and turn, and one which I could have not predicted at all. It has been good, it has been bad, and it has been interesting to say the least. For those who don’t know me, I ended up studying for a Bachelors Degree in Politics & Eastern European Studies at UCL. How did I end up in web production, you might ask? Good question!
The Beginning
I suppose it started in 1996 when my father kindly obliged my fancy with the purchase of a custom Windows laptop and with which I got online, spent many an hour in the backwaters of internet chat rooms and taught myself to build pages out of the bricks and mortar of the web. In 1997 I finished with school and despite my better judgment followed my father’s advice to study Law. Being the creative type that was pretty much a waste of time, and with no university place, and a love for computers I started investigating Computer Science courses. My lack of a Maths A-Level and Sciences appeared to be yet another blocker, and so it was that I ended up on a Politics course thinking that I had an interest and passion for the kind of topic that only makes you want to slit your wrists.
Fast forward a couple of years and I was ready to quit, but my common sense prevailed and I decided to see out the final third of the course I was on, which I did, passing suitably and picking up my degree certificate, which takes pride of place in some paper filled box on a shelf somewhere in my flat. I was now the proud owner of a slip of paper that showed I had passed through some perfunctory system and which bestowed upon others the notion that I had picked up certain skills in attaining my degree that were likely undeserved or completely fictitious.
Going It Alone
And so fresh out of university, what do I do? I go self-employed. Not one of course to put all that hard work to waste in finding a suitable employer. Anyhow, I battle away for many a year, finding projects, and teaching myself the need-to-know as I go in a completely organic manner. I even pay people to build applications and sites for clients which I then break apart and teach myself, so next time I can do it myself.
As my father always quips, and he should know he has been self-employed since 1978, there is a fine line between being self-employed and unemployed, and so it was that I was lucky enough to pick up a long term consulting gig with a cool little company in Colorado – oh for the advantage of a network of a web contacts, a friend of a friend, working for a woman, who knows these guys who need help! 4 years of hard graft pay off and I learn a lot in the process of what to do and what not to do in developing, deploying and testing web based systems.
Putting My Nose to the Grind Stone
By this time the degree is a distant held memory and the degree paper lost in my mind, whilst my work couldn’t be further from Russian Government, Boris Yeltsin, Foucault, Burke, and the Hammer & Sickle. The experience gained in the prior 9+ years of trial and error, self-teaching and relevant work experience all feathers in the cap on my CV. It’s 2006, and after a 3 month break from work I decide it is time to actually start looking for full-time employment. After the previous kick backs from recruiters with the stock phrase “not enough commercial experience” I was reticent to join the throng vying for their attention. And so to cut a long story short, I ended up applying for 2 jobs direct at source, getting offers from both, accepting the second, and having placed myself on the job market was snapped up within a week or so.
Being stuck at a computer for 9 hours a day was a shock to the system after being the master of my own schedule for so long, and my body was telling me it hated it to, but i kept at it, and the atmosphere was fun and the company and the web site growing exponentially and FAST. In fact I still remember the first day I joined, and I will never forget the job interview that’s for sure. Turning up in ripped jeans and a leather jacket. My father was shocked, demanding “You’re not going to the interview like that are you?” To which I retorted “If I don’t go like this, I won’t get the job.”
Fast forward another 2.5 years and I have picked up yet more invaluable experience, with one of the top 250 web sites on the web. That’s the kind of experience you couldn’t easily pay good money for. Not only that, I learned a lot about the dynamics of a growing team and how to best work within it and the demands of managing a team on a single product site with a passionate audience. It was all good, but it was also time to move on, get back to the small team, creative environment with a little more social responsibility that I loved.
Ringing Off The Hook
Having put my CV on Monster the phone was literally ringing off the hook – apparently recruiters couldn’t get enough of web 2.0 – and it was nigh on impossible to manage everything without letting the cat out of the bag, but I knew I needed to line up something before I simply jumped ship. I skulked around for some 2 weeks, performing breakfast interviews, lunch time tests, and mid-afternoon phone interviews. Two weeks of this process, with details of each and every recruiter and job prospects scrawled on the back of a piece of scrap paper, was about as much as I could take, and so after batting down a bunch of potentials I whittled everything down to 2 final candidates and plumped for the best option: a growing ‘start-up’ with a solid base behind it.
That was a year ago and the last 12 months have been more than fun, interesting, useful, and have taught me a lot. I can’t say I ever thought I would be involved in a project that would win a Cannes Lion or 2 when I joined, but we have and it’s all good. We fly below the radar but our work stands out and it speaks for itself. What more can you want?
Passion and Motivation
And so it is that I have lasted 10 years in a field in which I have NO formal training. Things I have done and been involved in will now always open doors for me and I have been very lucky. Life is all about luck I think and you can never be certain what will come your way. Of course you make your own luck, but each human life is unique and no two people will have the same experiences.
My passion has been a real driver, it is passion that makes the world go round, but at the same time, without my discipline to self-teach and learn, in conjunction with plenty of decent job experience, I would be nowhere near where I am now. And my degree in all this? You might well ask! I can’t say it helped in coding up a semi-pornographic website in the job test for E-map. Way to go guys!
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
Londonconstant Mar 25, 2010
Your remarks remind me of a true story held over port at the high table at Trinity Cambridge where one olf fellow asked another a guy with a military background Lenox- Cunningham, head of the Department of Geophysics:
which brings me to your other statement regarding passion, imagination doubled by hard work which are the essential but not only ingredients of success – luck has also to be on one’s side as much as being in the right place at the right time. Political and economic factors which make or break a project are beyond one’s control. Diplomas are certainly useful to shut people up, in case they might use it as a filter in promotion… and sometimes to say brazenly as many silly things as everybody else.
As for the much misused and abused Anglo-Saxon expression: “you are lucky” in my arrogant salad days I always maintained the “luck is a self-made artifice”. Well I may experience some difficulty now in maintaining the same.
Tellers of the Gen Y Story « Tara L. Connolly Sep 15, 2010
[...] of that in-depth analysis and demands you daily justify yourself (can you tell I am one as well?). In a similar reflection to Jessie’s, Vincent Roman writes about having studied Political Science and going from [...]